Best UK Phone Companies & How to Get a Free Sim Card

Which are the Best UK Phone Companies?

How to Get a Free SIM Card With a UK Mobile Number When We Arrive for The First Time in this Country?

You’ve just arrived in the UK, now you urgently need a mobile number and you don’t know where to start?. In this post we are going to tell you which are the best UK phone companies and how to get a free sim card.

Thanks to the EU and the UK Service providers collaboration recently, all mobile phones from all around Europe can now roam for FREE (for most providers) and you could use your phone like you’re back in your home country (EU Countries) bearing your existing phone numbers.

If you plan to have a more local number instead, which also makes life easier when someone local asks for your phone number, you can have one and it won’t cost you too much money.

Just make sure your mobile phone has been unlocked by your previous service provider or you’ve bought the phone that’s not on a contract. If its still on an active contract (locked), it would most probably not register the new service providers in the UK.

MOBILE SERVICE PROVIDERS IN THE UK

In the UK, you can find a variety of service providers. It can be confusing when you’re in a new country, Questions like which provider have better coverage? or which of them is cheaper? or which provider gives the best value?

GiffGaff:

From our personal experience, the best starter-pack mobile phone service provider is GiffGaff. They are cheap, have great value for money coverage, offers various sizes of sim-cards and reasonable internet connection speeds.

GiffGaff provides a mail order service for their sim-cards, which means, you could visit their website to order your new sim-card mailed to an address of your choice in the UK (eg. a hostel, rented house, friend’s house, hotel, etc.).

These mail order sims usually arrives in 1-2 days from your request, the last time I ordered, it arrived in my mailbox in less than 48 hours. With that said, you can actually order the sim-pack at the same time you’re doing check-in for your flight and get it when you arrive. They do not require any proof of address or ID for a new sim-card.

Other thing that we like of them is they are flexible with the plans. You can change it every month according with your needs. That means you could change to a bigger or smaller data pack to suit your usage starting from 500MB(£5.00), 2Gb(£7.50), 3Gb(£10.00), 4Gb(£12.00), 8Gb(£15.00), 20Gb(£20.00) or Always-On (£25.00).

Another good thing is that the calls between GiffGaff mobiles or other companies are free. We are using this company since we got here and we are staying with them for the moment.

As this service provider is value-for-money… in some areas, the cellular connection is poor, but this is common with any mobile service providers in the UK, no ones perfect.

⇒ If you would like to get GiffGaff, use our link in www.GiffGaff.com and get £5.00 credit for FREE.

EE:

EE is also one of the best companies to choose from. Just like GiffGaff, they are cost effective, have good value-for-money coverage, offers various sizes of SIM-cards and comes with reasonable internet connection speeds.

Some of our relatives are using it and they haven’t had any problems with them.

They said that the coverage is better, but the prices of the plans are a little more expensive than with GiffGaff.

Other Mobile Service Providers:

Other than those two companies, there are other providers such as :

We can’t say if these companies are better or worse, because we haven’t used it any of them. But you can go to the website and see if you like what they are offering at the moment. One of Harris’ friends said that Three Mobile have superb coverage, maybe you should check them out.

Just so you know, in the UK, you are allowed to carry the phone number registered to you onto another provider,

eg. You have a phone number with GiffGaff (eg: +44 7123 456789) that you’ve been on this network for a few weeks and finally decided that you would like to move to EE or any other UK service provider, you could transfer your +44 7123 456789 phone number to EE.

All you need is ask for a PAC code from GiffGaff to be filled up into a form with EE and set a date of the transfer to your new EE simcard. But before you perform a transfer, be aware of any credit balances you have on the old account as it will not be refunded.

WIFI (BROADBAND) AT HOME

Nowadays everyone (almost :P) need WIFI at home, whether for work or for leisure.

If you need to get WIFI plan for your home, you could sign up with internet service providers like BT (British Telecoms), Sky or Post Office.

We used Post Office service in the beginning, but now we are using BT because the speed is faster, but of course, the monthly charge is more expensive. Our plan with BT costs about £44.00/month including phone line rental and 72 mbps fibre-broadband.

You can take a look at their websites and see what suits your needs. They also have packages with phone-calls and cable TV.

Just a little tip for you, for every broadband service, you’ll need to include phone line rental even if you don’t want to use a landline phone.

Here are some links for you:

BT http://www.bt.com
Sky http://www.sky.com
Post Office http://www.postoffice.co.uk/broadband-phone

» If you are moving to the UK, you may also be interested in other post about “Where to live & how to rent a property in the UK” and “Open a UK Bank Account“.